Organising your Link Trades
 

For those people who don't use a 3rd party site for setting up and maintaining link trades, how do you find it best to organise your trades so you know what sites you have contacted or dealt with in the past?

I have just started recording everything in a spreadsheet, nothing fancy just some details about different sites like webmaster contact details, site URL etc, so I don't end up emailing the same person twice for a trade.

I then colour code them so I can see at a glance if I already have a link to them, if the site doesn't have a links section or if the site is blacklisted from my sites etc. etc.

A spreadsheet is probably the best option, sure beats the back of a cigarette pack :D

A notebook and a pen.

a notebook never gets corrupted, accidentally deleted, or hacked.

True, but when a wife cleans a desk notebooks can disappear :(

You actually allow your wife to touch your desk? |whip|

notebook and a pen and a spreadsheet and e-mail backup and I still miss some ... I'm not ashamed to admit I make mistakes :-)
so now I'm working on my own link checker that should keep it all in order

Surely searching through that could be a real pain no?

I have backups on a spare drive inside the computer, and an external drive, and it is encrypted so hopefully it should be safe! (Although now I have totally jinxed it!!)

.txt file works for me. black on white no colors:D.